单选题Reading to oneself is a modem activity which was almost unknown to the scholars of the classical and medieval worlds while during the fifteenth century the term " reading" undoubtedly meant reading aloud. Only during the nineteenth century did silent reading become commonplace. One should be wary, however, of assuming that silent reading came about simply because reading aloud is a distraction to others. Examination of factors related to historical development of silent reading reveals that it became the usual mode of reading for most adult reading tasks mainly because the tasks themselves, changed in character. The last century saw a steady gradual increase in literacy, and thus in the number of readers. As readers increased, so the number of potential listeners declined, and thus there was some reduction in the need to read aloud. As reading for the benefit of listeners grew less common, so came the flourishing of reading as a private activity in such public places as libraries, railway carriages and offices, where reading aloud would cause distraction to other readers. Towards the end of the century there was still considerable argument over whether books should be used for information or treated respectfully, and over whether the reading of material such as newspapers was in some way mentally weakening. Indeed this argument remains with us still in education. However, whatever its virtues, the old shared literacy culture had gone and was replaced by the printed mass media on the one hand and by books and periodicals for a specialized readership on the other. By the end of the century students were being recommended to adopt attitudes to books and to use skills in reading them which were inappropriate, if not impossible, for the oral reader. The social, cultural, and technological changes in the century had greatly altered what the term "reading" implied.

单选题WhatwaswrongwithMr.Jackson?A.Hehadtoothache.B.Hehurthislegs.C.Hisfalseteethdidn'tfit.D.Somethingwaswrongwithhisfingers.

单选题What's the author's purpose in writing this passage?

单选题Darry Darry is 45 years old and a mother of three children. Jeff, the oldest, is a junior at a state university. Nora is 17 and in her senior year of high school. The youngest child, Kevin, is 13 and in eighth grade. Her husband Bob is a sales representative for a pharmaceutical firm. Bob has been transferred many times during his career which has caused the family to move often. But now he is based at the company' s home office. She worked as a nurse before she became a mother, she worked on and off as part-time nurse for a home nursing agency while she was raising the children. One of her regrets is that she never was able to attain a college degree. She tried many times to take a night class while the children were younger. However, Bob' s travel schedule and the hassle of finding baby sitters became major barriers. Lately, she has considered returning to school. There is a community college 20 minutes from her home. She doesn' t know what program of study she would like to pursue. Her one major reservation is her concern for Kevin, the youngest. She also worries about Nora, who lately has been giving too much attention to her social life and less to her studies. Sun Sun is a 76-year-old stroke victim. At the age of 70, she was stricken with a massive stroke that left her paralyzed on the right side and without speech. Sun could comprehend messages most of the time but could not express her feelings verbally. Before the stroke she worked part-time at the Chicago Cultural Center, attended lessons at the Art Institute of Chicago, and pursued the study of piano at the Fine Arts Conservatory of Chicago. She cherished her family. The most important people in her life were her son Ted and her daughter Mafia. Ye Min Ye Min is 69 years old. She recently became widowed. Ye Min had been married to her husband Walter for 49 years. Walter died suddenly from a heart attack. Ye Min and Walter had a very good marriage. They were planning a cruise for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. She has three adult children: Sarah, 46 years old, David, 44 years old, and Justin,32 years old. Sarah and David are both married and are raising families. Justin is single. She has a part-time job at a local bakery. She works three times a week as a salesperson. Her life has changed greatly since Walter died. Friends who have their spouses seldom include Ye Min in their social plans since Walter died. Although Ye Min and Walter were close, she also has thought of herself as highly independent. She has ambivalent feelings about living alone. Now match each of the persons with the appropriate statement. Note: there are two extra statements. statements A. Nothing is more important than marriage and family for her. B. She sacrificed a lot of herself for her children and family. C. She had been taking an active part in life before she became disabled. D. She had too many worries. E. She used to have a good marriage.

单选题There was one thought that air pollution affected only the area immediately around large cities with factories and heavy automobile traffic. At present, we realize that although these are the areas with the worst air pollution, the problem is literally worldwide. On several occasions over the past decade, a heavy cloud of air pollution has covered the east of the United States and brought health warnings in rural areas away from any major concentration of manufacturing and automobile traffic. In fact, the very climate of the entire earth may be infected by air pollution. Some scientists consider that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the air resulting from the burning of fossil fuels (coal and oil)is creating a "greenhouse effect" ― conserving heat reflected from the earth and raising the world'' s average temperature. If this view is correct and the world'' s temperature is raised only a few degrees, much of the polar ice cap will melt and cities such as New York, Boston, Miami, and New Orleans will be in water. 　　Another view, less widely held, is that increasing particular matter in the atmosphere is blocking sunlight and lowering the earth'' s temperature ― a result that would be equally disastrous. A drop of just a few degrees could create something close to a new ice age, and would make agriculture difficult or impossible in many of our top farming areas. Today we do not know for sure that either of these conditions will happen (though one recent government report drafted by experts in the field concluded that the greenhouse effect is very possible). Perhaps, if we are lucky enough, the two tendencies will offset each other and the world''s temperature will stay about the same as it is now.

单选题Directions: Read the following text. Choose the best word or phrase for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on ANSWER SHEET 1. Many people wrongly believe that when people reach old age, their families place them in nursing homes. They are left in the {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}} {{/U}}of strangers for the rest of their lives. Their {{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}children visit them only occasionally, but more often, they do not have any {{U}} {{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}visitors. The truth is that this idea is an unfortunate myth {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}story. In fact, family members provide over 80 percent of the care {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}elderly people need. Samuel, a sociologist, studied {{U}} {{U}} 6 {{/U}} {{/U}}the American family is changing. He reported that by the time the {{U}} {{U}} 7 {{/U}} {{/U}}American couple reaches 40 years of age, they have more parents than children. {{U}} {{U}} 8 {{/U}} {{/U}}, because people today live longer after an illness than people did years {{U}} {{U}} 9 {{/U}} {{/U}}, family members must provide long term care. More psychologists have found that all care-givers {{U}} {{U}} 10 {{/U}} {{/U}}a common characteristic: All caregivers believe that they are the best {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}for the job. In other words, they all felt that they {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}do the job better than anyone else. Social workers {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}caregivers to find out why they took {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}the responsibility of caring for an elderly relative. Many caregivers believed they had {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}to help their relative. Some stated that helping others {{U}} {{U}} 16 {{/U}} {{/U}}them feel more useful. Others hoped that by helping {{U}} {{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}now, they would deserve care when they became old and {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}} {{/U}}. Caring for the elderly and being taken care of can be a {{U}} {{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}satisfying experience for everyone who might be {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}} {{/U}}.

单选题{{I}} Questions 21-23 are based on the instruction you've just heard.{{/I}}

单选题Just outside the northern Italian town of Bra, there rises a church tower with a clock that is a half hour slow. In Bra, that's close enough to being tight on time. Though not far from the industrial city of Turin, Bra smells of roses, and leisure is the law. It is both the home of an international movement that promotes "slow food" (the opposite of American fast food) and one of 31 Italian municipalities that have joined a sister cause, the "slow cities." These cities have declared themselves paradises from the accelerating pace of life in the global economy. In Bra, population 27,866, the town fathers have declared that all small food shops be closed every Thursday and Sunday. They forbid cars in the town square. All fruits and vegetables served in local schools must be organic. The city offers cut-rate mortgages to homeowners who do up their houses using a local butter-colored material and reserves choice commercial real estate for family shops selling handmade chocolates or specialty cheeses. And if the movement leaders get their way, the slow conception will gradually spread across Europe. The argument for a Slow Europe is not only that slow is good, but also that it can work. The Slow City movement, which started in 1999, has turned around local economies by promoting local goods and tourism. Young Italians are moving from larger cities to Bra, where Unemployment is only 5 percent, about half the nationwide rate. Slow food and wine festivals draw thousands of tourists every year. Shops are thriving, many with sales rising at a rate of 15 percent per year. "This is our answer to globalization," says Paolo Saturnini, the founder of Slow Cities. France is the favored proving ground for supporters of what might be called slow economics. Most outsiders have long been doubtful of the French model: short hours and long vacations. Yet the French are more productive on an hourly basis than counterparts in the United States and Britain, and have been for years. The mystery of French productivity has fueled a Europe-wide debate about the merits of working more slowly.

单选题In the 1990s, everyone believed that education was the key to economic success. A college degree, even a postgraduate degree, was essential for anyone who wanted a good job as one of those "symbolic analysts". But computers are proficient at analyzing symbols; it is the messiness of the real world that they have trouble with. Therefore, many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. The others can be done by any intelligent person, whether or not he has studied world literature. This trend should have been obvious in 1996. Even then, America’s richest man was Bill Gates, a college drop-out who did not need a lot of formal education to build the world’s most powerful in- formation technology company. Or consider the panic over "downsizing" that gripped America in 1996. As economists quickly pointed out, the rate at which Americans were losing jobs in the 90s was not especially high by historical standards. Downsizing suddenly became news because, for the first time, white-collar, college- educated workers "were being fired in large numbers, even while skilled mechanists and other blue-collar workers were in demand. This should have signaled that the days of ever-rising wage premiums for people with higher education were over. Eventually, the eroding payoff(工资的发放)of higher education created a crisis in education it-self. Why should a student put himself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work to acquire credentials(资格;证书)with little monetary value? These days, jobs that require only 6 or 12 months of vocational training—paranursing (特别护理), carpentry, household maintenance and so on—pay nearly as much if not more than a job that requires a master’s degree, and pay more than one requiting a PhD. So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one—a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.

单选题In the experiments, ______.

单选题Greek mythology is largely made up of stories about gods and goddesses, but it must not be read as a kind of Greek Bible, an account of the Greek religion. According to the most modern idea, a real myth has nothing to do with religion. It is an explanation of something in nature; how, for instance, any and everything in the universe came into existence: men, animals, this or that tree or flower, the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, eruptions, earthquakes, all that is and all that happens. Thunder and lightning ale caused when Zeus hurls his thunderbolt. A volcano erupts because a terrible creature is imprisoned in the mountain and every now and then struggles to get free. The Dipper (大熊星座), the constellation (星座) called also the Great Bear, does not set below the horizon because a goddess once was angry at it and decreed (命令) that it should never sink into the sea. Myths ale early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them. But there are many so-called myths which explain nothing at all. These tales are pure entertainment, the sort of thing people would tell each other on a long winter's evening. The story of Pygmalion (皮格马利翁) and Galatea is all example; it has no conceivable connection with any event in nature. Neither has the Quest of the Golden Fleece (录找金羊毛), nor Orpheus (奥菲士，竖琴圣手) and Eurydice, nor many another. This fact is now generally accepted; and we do not have to try to find in every mythological heroine the moon or the dawn and in every hero's life a sun myth. The stories are early literature as well as early science. But religion is there, too. In the background, to be sure, but nevertheless plain to see. From Homer through the tragedians and even later, there is a deepening realization of what human beings need and what they must have in their gods.

单选题Many thousands of hydrocarbon compounds are possible because______.

单选题According to Peter Senior, ______.

单选题{{I}}Questions 18 to 21 are based on the following monologue{{/I}}

单选题{{B}}Part A{{/B}} {{I}} You will hear 10 short dialogues. For each dialogue, there is one question and four possible answers. Choose the correct answer—A, B, C or D, and mark it in your test booklet. You will have 15 seconds to answer the question and you will hear each dialogue ONLY ONCE. Now look at Question 1.{{/I}}